Demons
By John Shirley
Del Rey, $25
ISBN 034544647X

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A horrifying war between good and evil

Black Butterflies, John Shirley's 1998 collection of short stories, is a set of sharply drawn portraits of evil, each one painted on an uncomfortably intimate canvas. In his new novel Demons, Shirley blows the lid off evil, giving it the widest possible range to wreak havoc. One day, suddenly, out of thick air, seven species of demons appear and begin to destroy the world, without mercy, and without any apparent theological context for their devastation.

The bloodthirsty operations of the creatures are species-specific: Gnashers, for instance, talk their victims literally to death, while Bugsys seduce their chosen victims into serving as sidekicks for a time, until the demons grow bored and kill the poor saps. The other species are not quite so companionable, taking shape as horrific parodies of sharks, spiders and even dishrags or tailpipes. All the species share one common trait: a terrible, devil-may-care attitude about their work, mirrored in the weird indifference of humanity in the face of this catastrophe. Shirley's opening sentence sums up the new state of mind: "It's amazing what you can get used to."

The reader, however, never gets used to these horrors, largely because the author keeps them too close to the bone of truth. In his preliminary note, Shirley informs us that the novel was written before September 11, but the story, as he puts it, is "not without relevance" to those events.

While the novel presents a war between good and evil waged on a grand scale, Shirley has not forsaken his craft of drawing intimate character studies. Like all good moral tales, the fate of this one rests in the hands of a few vivid individuals. Shirley shamelessly draws on a repository of familiar types -- the evil industrialist and his moll, the hapless artist, the cranky professor, the noble man of color, the woman impregnated with supernatural goodness, the ordinary joe who finds himself on a knife's edge between light and darkness. Somehow, Shirley breathes freshness into all these cardboard figures, composing a miniature epic in which the diabolical aspects of our troubled times materialize with dreadful implacability.

This haunted novelist, like one of his book's heroes, cannot help hearing "the groan of the world." After reading Demons, the reader's ears will become uneasily open as well.

Michael Alec Rose teaches at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music.